


After The Storm, The Silence

by render



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Arcadia Bay, F/F, Healing, Love, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, True Love, pricefield, sac bay, save bae
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 15:38:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5933635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/render/pseuds/render
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the last few minutes of the drive her breath had dropped shallower, shallower, shallower, until Chloe was crying out loud, shouting that she couldn't see her breathing, couldn't see Max breathing, and then she spoke only to Max, a low, unbreaking, broken string of entreaties, imprecations, threats. </p><p>The lights were out at every crossing. On any other day, chaos. But there was no traffic. The wrecked portion of the town lay below them, the sea beyond, and the sky, mockingly calm. Here, towards the perimeter, the roads were clear, as David had hoped. But still he sweated, expecting at any moment a wily predator, a semi or SUV, an ambulance maybe, to drift out into the road before him, too close to avoid, too close...</p>
            </blockquote>





	After The Storm, The Silence

"What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."

Friedrich Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_

 

The light was crashing into her eyes, waking her. She knew the speed. She could chant it, if asked, like she was back in the classroom, facing the huge black square starred and scarred with chalk. One hundred eighty six thousand three hundred miles per second. She wondered that such a thing couldn't be felt.

Chloe raised her head, and her vision thrummed and whined. Her eyes burst with novas, galaxies, the jangling fingers of a passing god. She let her head thump down again. 

She kept her eyes closed. Her hat was missing; she could feel dampness in her hair. The air too felt damp. Her awareness expanded. The sound of trees chattering, passing whatever secrets trees have - the shaping of the branch and the dark-delving root - from leaf to leaf. Birds. The sea running back and forth across the beach, barking with a dog's excitement.

Finally she raised her head, and looked.

The town was a scar, or what would be a scar. Chloe knew, had learned well, how to read wounds. Like tire tracks in the mud - you look for the sharp edges, the hard edges, before wind and weather and time, time, time have had a chance to soften them. Wounds, whether seen or unseen, bodily or mental - the sharp edge. That's how you know the cut is fresh. 

The town, sharp in the morning light, was a fresh cut across the bay. On the outskirts the destruction was less severe; she could see the spire of Blackwell still standing. Chloe couldn't remember if she had said it, or Max: 'It's like the school told the architects, "You know, we really really want everyone to know how much we enjoy giving this whole dipshit town the finger."' The storm had done nothing to address this particular injustice.

Towards the front not a building stood. Cars had been tossed, picked up and crumpled in giant hands. Several semis lay with their backs broken across the main drag. Trees waved their roots in the air, as if they had fallen playing cartwheels. A mess. Aside from this, it could have been described forever and never be described fully. A mess. Something which would, one day, be a scar.

Chloe turned. Her body ached and protested. Max lay beside her. She panicked for a moment, until she saw the chest rise and fall with the first of ten slow, steady breaths that Chloe counted, without realising, her lips moving silently.

This was the moment of her greatest crisis. Since she had awoken a single thought had governed her in her lingering half-sleep: go to the edge. The cliffs were high, nothing below but rock and water, water and rock. Quick. Painless. She deserved neither. The town was gone, and she was here. But she was also afraid to die, truly afraid; too many ghosts had tramped over her grave in the last few days, the last few hours, for her to contemplate anything but a speedy going. The last few days, last few hours, seemed to fold years inside them, like a pop-up book of time. No, she couldn't bear a slow going. Time was the enemy, their strong enemy. The strongest. Let's see who's strong, she told herself, before she stood and made her way to the edge.

For a long time she stood. Beneath her, gulls drifted, looped, taunting her with their ease. She swayed on the brink, and several times it was only the involuntary twitching of her calves, the swaying of her hands, which kept her from toppling forward. Simplicity itself to overrule them, to simply stand stiff until her own weight overbalanced her into the air, to kiss and be swallowed by the sea's lips.

For a long time she stood. She did not jump; she was afraid, but this was not why. The wide space before her held up no hand to stop her. But it was only that, under her breath, all the while, she still counted in sync with the other one breathing behind her. 

When she turned away from the cliff her body was cracking with sobs, some black creature inside fighting its way from its egg. Despair, self-recrimination. She wondered how she had stood so calmly, in the night, to watch the storm dance its wedding dance with the town. People are different in the night. Bodies are different. The eyes dilate. The heart loosens, it stands up tall in the chest. Prepared for grand hopes, for every encounter, for escapades and bounty. At night the heart can bear more. But hope weaves coarse curtains; the morning always shows through, comes through the gaps. 

Fresh sobs came. The creature, despair, howled and groaned with her voice. Max slept through it all.

After a time, the noise subsided.

She had fallen to her elbows and knees. She pulled her hands out of the cold muck, wiped grass and dirt onto her jeans. On her knees Chloe looked at the sky.

'Fuck you,' she said.

Then, to complete the spell: 'Fffucker.'

She was beginning to feel like herself again. God, she wished she had a j.

Max's body when she lifted it was limp, light. Still sleeping.

Light as Max was, she couldn't carry her. After a few steps she had to let her down again. The release was not as gentle as it could have been - Max's body dropped with a thud onto the grass. But still sleeping. 

Chloe's panic returned. Not sleep. If sleep was a sea this was the depths of the ocean, the blackness of space. Sleep amongst the strangest dreams, dreams with willowisp lights and sharp teeth and great, dayblind eyes.

She realised she had shouted. She felt like she was two seconds behind herself. 'You promised, Max! Never again, you fucking promised! I can't do this shit alone!'

Her heart was hammering. 

She closed her eyes again. There, in the private night behind her lids, she fought for her night-self, the heart of her night hopes. 

 

Kate was falling, rewinding, falling again, bouncing like a yoyo from the finger of Blackwell Academy. But the cord, the noose, whatever force pulled her back up again and dropped her was too long, because every time her body met the ground with a wet crack before again she was wrenched up again and dropped.

For several weeks now, things had been unravelling. One morning, Max had seen the custodian, Samuel, straighten up from something on the lawn, and look at her, and lift a hand to push the last inch of a squirrel's tail into his mouth. Walking down the corridor behind Ms Grant, she had seen fifteen small yellow flowers appearing across the woman's back and shoulders, bobbing and swaying as she walked. Warren, carefully pouring chemicals from beaker to beaker, his body an ape's from the neck down.

Such things were easy to brush off in isolation. Trauma. 

Chloe was dead. Max etched words on her desk, not caring if she was seen: 'We all end up alone with our killers.'

Return to classes. Study. When spoken to, speak. 'Routine', they all said. 'Time', they all said, and couldn't understand why this one well-intentioned word seemed to hurt her so much.

She thought back to the funeral, Chloe's coffin already lowered to lie beside her father's, with the crowd dispersing in uncertain singles, pairs and threes, and how it had started snowing. She had thought, 'But she'll be cold' and only then felt able to cry in quiet, contained sobs, not wanting to be seen, not being able to bear the clumsy animals people were, the clumsy efforts they made to reach across the divide between them. But then she'd shaken herself, and reminded herself again that it hadn't snowed that day, that it had snowed on the first day, the day Chloe was shot, and then she'd shaken herself again, and remembered that it hadn't snowed that day either, had never snowed that day, had never snowed, because Chloe _had_ been shot, Chloe was dead and cold and soon colder still, and Max's whole life lay before her like a curse.

So. Trauma. She was confused.

But now Max turned the corner onto the lawn before the Blackwell spire and looked up, stunned and horrified, where Kate was falling and rising, falling and rising, and for a moment it was clear that something was wrong with the world, that it was too was falling and rising moment by moment, the world or Max herself.

 

It was David who found them, David who told Chloe.

'Mom?' she asked, and he said, 'I'm sorry', and shook his head once. He bore himself up, somehow, under such a weight of weary sadness that she couldn't bring herself to reject his apology or despise him for bringing it. She would have done, only a few days earlier. But still when he approached and offered his arms to her she retreated, choked through her tears, 'No, fuck - no. I'm sorry. I can't.'

'It's okay,' David said, subsiding. 'I get it. I do.' There was a wound on his forehead, rust of blood caked with dirt and sand. Joyce was dead. His eyes were a thousand miles away, looked out over desert a thousand miles across. 'The car's just down in the lot. You know the place. I'll wait for you there.' 

But when he turned to go Chloe blurted, 'No. Time for my shit later. Something's wrong with Max. You've got to help me get her to the hospital.'

 

'Normal activities,' Principal Wells said. He was facing the window. 'Normal routine. To be entirely honest, this willful self-indulgence in your emotions goes quite against the grain here.'

Max's feet writhed together under the chair. The last time she had been here it had been after Kate jumped, nearly jumped, who could remember? Had Kate jumped? But she, Max, had never been here, in this office, because Chloe was dead and had Kate not jumped? She had always never been here. What she remembered referred to nothing. A week of time folding in on itself, collapsing like a black hole. No escape, just traces.

As if she had spoken out loud, Principal Wells turned back to her. Max's chair was in a birdcage, and the birdcage swung at the impact of his hands clapping together. 'Yes, that would be excellent. Normal activities. Warren, you'll be happy to help Miss Caulfield in her endeavours to recapture her Blackwell spirit, won't you?'

Behind her, Warren said yes. She didn't turn round because she knew from the sound of his voice that Warren must be horribly burned.

 

The trees flashed by overhead, but the sun kept pace with them easily. 

David watched the road with care, keeping both hands on the wheel, ten and two, ten and two. He drove as fast as he dared, taking the racing line at every bend, feeling the wheels scrabble at the dirt on the inside of every corner, felt them fight for grip, catch, clutch, and then the tarmac hummed under them again.

The road had been clear to the lighthouse - a small miracle - but now he was taking a different route, direct as he could, to the hospital. So he watched the road with care, darting brief glances into the rear view mirror every time they hit a decent straight.

'How is she?'

He watched Chloe open her mouth to answer, cradling Max's small head in her lap. She shook her head. Don't know, the gesture said. Max's breathing hadn't altered. In one of his brief glances, David saw, or thought he saw, flecks of blood caked dry under her nose. 

'David look out!' The memory startled him so much he nearly jerked the wheel - but something else within him, with a compass's dedication, corrected the course immediately, skidded them back onto their path. He heard Chloe shouting at him from the back seat to keep his goddamn paddy wagon on the road.

He had remembered a dream he had, whenever he last had slept. A dark mass hurrying toward him, swinging towards him slow and deadly and grinding unseen machinery like windmill's propellor, and a face behind it, Jefferson's face, never trusted that fucker. And a voice behind it, behind _him_ , a voice he had recognised, in his moment of recollection, as Max's voice, saying he did not know what, did not remember, but translated into the moment, repeated in time with his heart, merely his own over and overing name: _David_ , _David_ , _David_. His, David's, dream-hands lifting, catching the brutal weight of the thing coming at him - gripping, pushing back against it.

Since he had finished with war, the greatest fight of David's life had been to stop fighting, to come home entirely. Every day he struggled to keep a clear view on himself, a hold on himself. The woman dying in the back seat; in his last dreams (absurd!) she had saved his life.

He swore, a string of expletives seasoned generously with military salt, before the car's engine roared louder still, drowning him out.

 

She had to hurry. She was late for class.

The subject was over-subscribed - Jefferson was a popular teacher - and she wanted to be sure to get a place front row, centre.

The classroom was almost fully occupied when she arrived, but she saw that a place at the front had been left for her. Someone had scrawled a spray in red on her chair, her name, in foot-high letters: MAX. Though it worried her that the paint might still be wet, she sat. 

Jefferson was waiting. He stood at the front of the class like a jackal in a suit and glasses. He scanned the desks before him, stroking his upper lip, waiting for his cue. He began to walk in a slow circle. He went once around the open space at the front of the class, leaned against his desk in a manner, Max supposed, the word 'louche' had been invented for - Mark Jefferson, louche garou - and began.

'Today we'll be picking up where we left off last time, when we covered the daguerreotype - so I thought we'd discuss post-mortem portraiture.' Jefferson didn't move, but somewhere a projector crackled into life, threw a large white square onto the wall behind him. After a second or so, the square was replaced by a photograph of a child, a toddler, dressed in a white dress, sprawled in its seat as if exhausted. Only the eyes, the dull eyes without focus, revealed the truth of the matter. And after that, other things appeared: the slackness at the mouth, the unnatural cupping of the hands, none of a toddler's stretch and sparkle. The child was dead.

'During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a frequent practice to photograph the recently deceased. Death was a commonplace back then, a fact of life.' Jefferson flashed his eyes around the classroom with a contemptuous grin. 'People didn't get nearly histrionic then as now. You died in your home, and your loved ones got to watch you. Maybe they assessed you as you went. Marks out of ten. The Oscar goes to.'

Jefferson coughed. He stood, silent, contemplative, his head down and his arms folded tight. 'An outrageous assertion. I humbly beg your forgiveness and discretion. But consider - !' and his eyes flashed up to the image of the child - 'the long exposure time of a daggeurotype made the dead subject the ideal subject. Many people at the time, particularly children, only had one photo taken of them, and that was when they died. Too much damn fidgeting. We never knew how to sit still. We're only really complete when we're dead. Done. Assessable.' 

The projector began to click, second by second, like a clock. With each click, the blank square briefly returned before a new photo slid into the frame. All black and white, all with subjects posed naturally, as if living, sat in a chair, lying as if asleep, but even a brief second of each was enough to reveal the absence there, the dullness of their abandoned bodies, like beds from which something, some impossible, immaterial sleeper, has arisen, and departed the frame. 

Jefferson sighed, a long, grandiose, heaving yawn, and stroked his chin. 'Images like these are more like etchings than snapshots. Looking at these photos we should all remember what technological advance has made we photographers forget: that time itself is a dimension of light.'

He snapped a finger. The slideshow stopped. Now only the white square showing.

Max knew, knew without turning, that the classroom around and behind her had grown vast, vast as an arena. A void extended away behind her; she felt it in the motions of the air over her shoulders. She realised she was shivering.

'Well,' Jefferson said. 'So. We should begin.'

He cleared his throat, looked up and over the huge space over Max's shoulder, as if searching.

'Rachel Amber,' he said and, perfectly on cue, the appropriate image appeared in the white square behind him.

 

In the car, David remembered the absence of weight in Max's body as he carried her, so light he felt she was dissolving. 

During the last few minutes of the drive her breath had dropped shallower, shallower, shallower, until Chloe was crying out loud, shouting that she couldn't see her breathing, couldn't see Max breathing, and then she spoke only to Max, a low, unbreaking, broken string of entreaties, imprecations, threats. 

The lights were out at every crossing. On any other day, chaos. But there was no traffic. The wrecked portion of the town lay below them, the sea beyond, and the sky, mockingly calm. Here, towards the perimeter, the roads were clear, as David had hoped. But still he sweated, expecting at any moment a wily predator, a semi or SUV, an ambulance maybe, to drift out into the road before him, too close to avoid, too close...

But then they were there. The hospital, white and gleaming above them. He was already out of the car, leaving the door open. He lifted Max as carefully and quickly as he could and hurried into the hospital, edging his way impatiently through slow sliding doors, Chloe hard on his heels.

'Medic!' he shouted, 'Medic!' He was thousands of miles distant, he joined the scene from a distant land, a desert land, years ago, under a hard sun.

People converged upon them. A gurney came, Max was laid upon it. Efficient voices talking in jargon, acronyms. Then they were going, already disappearing into the bleached white depths of the hospital. They went to follow, Chloe and David both, but were prevented.

After the storm, the silence. The silence - this is the moment the sirens come. Nothing now but the waiting.

 

Rachel left her desk and stepped forward to the front of the class. Jefferson was gone. Now it was Wells standing there, Wells wearing Jefferson's glasses, Jefferson's jackal grin. 

Rachel approached him, and the Principal gave her a tightly wrapped parchment, tied with a black ribbon.

'Congratulations on graduating,' the Principal said, and Rachel beamed.

'Wait,' Max said. 'Wait.' But Rachel had already looked out over the class, still beaming, and turned, approached the wall where the white square also beamed, the wall now lined with a grid of white frames, white instant photo frames like a morgue with all its hatches open. Rachel reached up with her free hand, grabbed the highest edge she could manage, and began to climb.

 

'Look, I appreciate that you both brought her in, but I can't tell you anything - '

Chloe's reply was loud, her voice practically breaking. The nurse looked unruffled; this was, quite clearly, her daily bread. 'For fuck's sake! Do you have any idea? Any fucking idea? I've known her since we were kids, kids in goddamn diapers! So would you just - '

She felt a weight on her shoulder, followed the hand up to see David's face, stern and reprimanding. But he was looking at the nurse.

'As you can see,' he said. 'My daughter is very upset. She's known Ms Caulfield - Max - known her a long time. Almost all her life. What you're doing, withholding - I know how cruel that is.'

The nurse looked from David to Chloe, and back again. 'You're her father? I'm sorry, but - I don't see the resemblance.'

David hardly missed a beat, but Chloe saw the muscles flare in his jaw. 'That's my cross to bear. Look. If you can, please try to see this as more than a box-ticking exercise, and tell me you wouldn't want to know what's happening with your friend.' Even as he said the last word, he felt its inadequacy to the situation.

But the nurse sighed. 'You didn't hear this from me.'

Chloe jumped. 'Lady, I couldn't care _less_ who you are - '

'Chloe.' This time, David's tone was keen and direct, but he didn't lose a note of entreaty. He wasn't ordering but appealing, strongly, as to an equal. Chloe subsided.

'Being blunt', the nurse said, 'there's not much I can tell you. Clearly she's heavily fatigued, and maybe dehydrated. Exposure. She hasn't eaten in many hours, it seems, and it appears as if she's been drawing heavy on resources she doesn't have. No bones broken.' She held up her hand as David began to speak again. 'We've sent her for an MRI. She went - ' The nurse glanced down at her watch. 'Well, she'll be out in five minutes or so. You might've seen there was some bleeding from the nose. But until the results comes back, there's nothing else.'

'What's her room?' Chloe again.

Then nurse thought for a second, clearly making a mental calculation along the lines of personal cost/benefit.

'Shoot,' she said, 'Hell with it,' and turned to lead them. 'Day like today, who the hell's going to notice? And it'll keep you both off my back at least.'

 

The town was walking past her, parading past Max in two orderly streams, like the trickle that undoes the flood. Principal Wells was calling them by name, and she, Max, was calling them too as they went by, trying to call them back. But they did not turn to her, they kept their backs to her, like proper creatures of the underworld. They answered Wells' summons, received the black-ribboned scroll, began to climb up the wall of photos. They found their own correct white square, passed within the frame, and then there were only portraits of them in black and white, posed as if living, but dead, each of them, their eyes flat like fish's eyes in the air.

'Zachary Riggins.'

In the projector's white glare, Zachary's photo. Zachary himself walking past her, ignoring his name as she called it. Zachary's broad back in his hooded top, taking the scroll like the last snap he would ever receive, Zachary, beginning the climb.

'Taylor Christensen.'

Taylor's photo. Taylor, who Max had taken to see her mother in her hospital, who had cried, and apologised for crying - had that happened here, now? What was phantom, what was recall? 

'Time is a dimension of light,' Jefferson said. 

Max's head was filled with ghosts, and she wasn't certain which of these ghosts were of the dead, which of those who had never lived. Taylor, beginning the climb.

'Hayden Jones.'

Hayden's photo.

 

'Then what _can_ you tell us?'

The doctor, not one bred for the world's front line, pinched his nose, and appeared to count to ten under his breath. Unlike the nurse, he seemed ill-prepared to handle Chloe's brand of energetic persistence; it's a quality the sick rarely possess.

Finally, he appeared to reach a decision. 'Ms - uh?'

Chloe brindled. 'What the fuck? Stop dodging the fucking question, sawbones.'

The doctor looked entreatingly at David, who said nothing, but folded his arms. The gesture had a certain eloquence, and the doctor knew enough to know when he was outgunned.

'Applied medicine,' he said, 'isn't an exact science. You can't just ask the patient "Well, what appears to be the ailment?" and hope that they've got a medical degree. You observe, interpret, guess. 

'So - she was on her way to hypothermia. Not there yet, her core temperature only dropped to just touch 96. That's the good news. Bad news: she was cyanotic when you got her in. She's breathing for herself so no ventilator, not yet, just an o2 concentrator. That's good. Also good: MRI showed an intracranial haemorrhaging.'

'How the hell's that good?' Chloe said.

'Well, it was a small bleed, extra-axial - I mean it was inside the skull but not in the brain itself. A small bleed near the right parietal lobe. Too early to assess the damage. She's showing neurological patterns - prominent theta-rhythms - consistent with REM sleep. But she's not emerging back into N-REM, so her body might not be able to maintain homeostasis, which means - '

'Doctor,' David said, because he could sense Chloe's frustration coiling back, a fresh bullet cycling into her chamber. 'English,' he said.

 

'David Madsen.'

Oh, not David. David, who had never even made it home, though he'd been there for years. David, paranoid, fighting David, for whom the stars had become so many eyes. 

'David', Max said, 'I'm so sorry. David - '

David, beginning the climb.

 

There was a moment of silence, during which the doctor almost audibly changed gears. 'She's asleep. Deep asleep. She came close to hypothermia, but not too close. She's breathing, but it's shallow, so she's on oxygen. Her blood pressure is low. That's bad. What's worse is it's dropping. She's weak. She might not be able to self-correct. Any other day, we'd have her in ICU. But, frankly, she's not our top priority right now.'

David spoke before Chloe could. 'Well, don't you just have the bedside charm?'

The doctor sighed. If they'd looked now they could have seen the kind of day he was facing. The storm had carved deep lines into his forehead.

'I don't like to say it. I'll try to keep a bed clear. She doesn't need a major intervention, we're placing a catheter to drain the fluid on her brain. It's a bedside procedure. In the meantime we keep her hydrated, we keep her fed, we keep her warm, and we wait. Sometimes time's the only healer.' He turned to Chloe with a brusqueness that clearly cost him some effort. 'You were with her prior to - the onset of her condition?'

Chloe nodded.

'May I ask - did she witness any traumatic events? Obviously, with recent events...' The doctor waved one arm uselessly, a gesture that seemed to try to indicate the world and everything in it. 'Did she witness the injury of anyone close to her? Violence of any kind? The storm?'

Chloe nodded again. Her eyes boiled. Tears not so much falling as steaming. 

'Yeah. Yeah, something like that.'

 

Jefferson was speaking again. 

'You can see how the Victorians altered the poses of the deceased to reflect their ages. Children in sweet repose, safely tucked in bed, sleeping, adults propped up in chairs, as if alive. Only the innocent sleep soundly, Maxine.'

Wells continued the roll. 'Frank Bowers.' Frank, Frank who died not alone, but absolutely lonely. Frank who never even had the time to comprehend the extent of his own grief, how much he had lost. 

Frank, beginning the climb.

 

'She may have just shut down for a while. Deep trauma. She's retreated, trying to rebuild. That would be okay at other times, maybe, but her body's struggling. We wait. I'll try to make sure a space is kept in ICU just in case, but, well, clearly today's an uncertain day for everyone.' 

Before the doctor could quite reach the door David asked him, 'Are there many?' Again the sigh.

'Tornadoes aren't usually high-mortality events. But that's in towns that are prepared for them, built with fierce winds in mind. And, of course, if people don't go running towards the damn thing for a closer view. So, yes. Not as many as you might expect. But more than you'd hope. More than enough.'

Then it was just the two of them. With the one in the bed, three. There was nothing to say, so they said nothing.

Max lay tucked under stiff blankets. They had clipped a bare square on her head, for the tube to suck out the blood in her brain. Now the square was covered in a white dressing. 'She's surrendering,' Chloe thought. There was an IV in Max's arm, a mask over her mouth and nose, a peg on her finger, hooked to a cable, telling things to a machine. It told the machine what it could never understand, that Max was alive. Of all the things in the room, Chloe hated that machine most, because it didn't do anything for Max, but would be the first to know if everything that had been done had been done in vain.

Not the doctors, not the nurses, not the hospital. Chloe's thoughts tumbled about inside her, hid behind one another, tripped one another up. Everything they had done together; everything _she_ had done, what Max had done alone. 

Back and forward, back and forward in time, afraid of being lost, but anchored only in a dark room, a vile place with that - creature, that thing, Jefferson. Cyclops in his lair. Back and forward, back and forward, dancing on the edges of black seas.

Chloe took Max's hand in her own. She leaned forward, until she saw her breath move the hair on Max's forehead. Max's eyes were pockets of shadow, the skull announcing itself beneath the skin. An opponent. Chloe always felt better with an opponent. You might not know where to stand - but with an opponent, you know at least which direction to face.

'Max,' she said. 'Max, I really hope you can hear me. Fuck.'

Chloe wiped at her face angrily.

'Sorry. No more f-bombs. Swear. Not that you care, but it's a big occasion, I wanna do it right.'

 

Jefferson, still speaking, still oiling words: 'Innocence and experience, Maxine. You've read Blake, of course. I remember your dedication to Kate. 'Burning bright...' Of course, a poem itself all about framing, construction, mastery. Appropriate for a photographer.' Then he laughed, all teeth and glint of glass. 'I've never read Blake, myself, of course. Romantic, fanciful. Trash. But you have, Max, and so, here, I have too. I know my favourite. 'Little Girl Lost'.

To her father white  
Came the maiden bright;  
But his loving look,  
Like the holy book,  
All her tender limbs with terror shook.

Wells' voice, still going: 'Stella Hill.'

Stella, beginning the climb.

 

Chloe, babbling words. She talks about yin and yang, past and future, high seas and low skies. But what it all comes down to: 

Max.

Come back.

I need you here.

I need you here. The shit's backing up,  
and everything's come apart,  
and I've got to rebuild a new life with no new pieces  
and some of the best ones missing

and I can't do that alone.

And if you don't, can't, wherever you're going, sure as hell I'll race you.

 

The classroom behind her had shrunk back to its normal size; she felt the air resume a habitual shape. There was only one person left behind her, and Jefferson had sunk into a satisfied silence, his eyes half-lidded, drunk.

Max too was silent. She had no voice left. Wells was a machine now, speaking in syllables - sounds, not words.

'Joyce. Price.'

Joyce, walking past, the weight of five years darned, patched sadness upon her. 

Joyce, beginning the climb.

Max feels sleepy, even though it's a dream. There are no others waiting now, no one left to be called. The wall is a field of pictures, acre upon acre. At the top, high above it, the Blackwell tower pointing, accusing, at a sky without stars.

Wells has gone, instead it is Max herself there, calling the final name, addressing her double sat in the chair tagged with her name.

'Maxine. Caulfield.'

Max stands, and goes to the wall. Hers is the highest climb. The tower high above her. It will take awhile, she is so sleepy. She must be careful. Take care. Show the Blackwell spirit.

She sets her hand on the edge of the picture before her. Victoria stares at her, her fire entirely out. 

Max sets her foot, and begins to climb.

But to one side of her she detects a shift in the dream-stuff. Someone else has come. She turns. There is a shock of bright blue hair. The rest follows. Chloe, one boot set up on a frame, her grin so wide you couldn't see the edges, and her heart showing big - ready for every encounter.

'C'mon', she says, 'Race ya.'

 

Of the three, now two were asleep. 

Once he turned it so he could not see the window, David took the room's other chair, on the side of the bed opposite his step-daughter. He watched the pair. Max prone as before, Chloe's head settled on the bed next to her, her body twisted in its chair.

He thought of the town around them, the chewed up waste. He allowed himself, now that it was safe to do so, to think of Joyce. He squeezed his eyes shut.

 

They climb.

Every point of their ascent brings them face to face with dead eyes. Because it is all that dead eyes can do, they accuse.

They climb, higher, higher, and the town is the ladder on which they climb, and the question is only what will happen at the height.

Chloe speaks. 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.'

Up and up. It is hours they climb, hours folded into minutes, into seconds. As they begin they are laughing, kids, but the eyes draw the laughter out of them almost immediately, so they climb in silence, the pair of them, on the shoulder of ghost after ghost after ghost.

 

The lights danced and hurt his eyes, so David opened them again. Once again he saw the pair of them sleeping.

What were they, these two? Lovers? No. Whatever they were swept over that word and kept going, going. 

David thought of times in the desert when your shadow lengthened, strode out before you, when the sun put its hands upon your back. 

Comrades. Even this word did not do. But it held the highest esteem in his vocabulary. 

Whatever they were could encompass everything, all the sludge they'd been through - could take it all - the dead ends, the false steps, bad choices and blundering reversals - turn it all to the service of their bond, with nothing left out. 

Such a thing, if there were such a thing - David could not say that it would make any of the destruction bearable, but it would give it a centre. If the world must spin, let it spin around something rare and strange and incredible.

Your shadow lengthening, striding out before you.

David had not prayed in six years. But it had never felt worse in all that time, that he found he was unable to now.

 

The tower narrows. They are side by side now, climbing grimly, exhausted, helping each other from handhold to handhold. Max is struggling. She cannot look at the faces any more.

Jefferson is there. 

\- Max, Max. How can expect to build upon your gift if you do not look? 

Max looks.

It is Kate. Kate, dressed in white. The cross on her chest has caught the light, has been etched in hard outlines of silver, but her eyes are dun grey.

Jefferson still there, still talking. His voice rides over a distant roar.

\- The camera is remarkable - an aesthetic anaesthetic. Everyone knows you lose your depth perception when you look through a camera. The world becomes flat. Maybe, for people like you or I, the danger is looking through a viewfinder for too long. We make people flat. How else could we make our sacrifices possible? By making them small.

The storm is here. It has found her, even here. The tower rocks and writhes beneath her hands. 

Chloe has gone.

Max keeps going. There is one window remaining. Above that, blackness. One window remaining.

It is Joyce. A black dress rises over her body, clutches her throat in its tight hands. She is sprawled in the seat, as if placed without care. 

Max feels her grip weakening. The sleep rises up her, a black dress of her own. 

But Joyce, a Joyce not in the picture, is there.

\- Bless you, hun. You know what I adore about your photos? 

She couldn't see Joyce anywhere, but she could sense her closeness. She spoke softer, but Max heard her clearer. The storm seemed to recede, to stumble. Jefferson's voice, lost within it, pale and weak. Joyce, even in her whisper, rising easily over him.

\- You make the little things big. 

Sleep is receding, the hands around Max's throat loosening.

\- We all give things up. But you can't make small what can't be counted. Sometimes you just have to make yourself bigger.

The top of the tower. It is a bare grey square. Chloe is there. She occupies all the space, wrapped tight up round herself like a seed, arms wrapped around her knees, but something has begun to loosen in the world, Max is able to occupy the same space. The storm has fallen.

Chloe is not speaking. She cannot speak. All around Max, the silence carries her words.

\- What do we do now? What the fuck can we do now?

Max pries apart the fingers, reaches desperately for one of the hands to clutch it, because she can feel herself being drawn up, forward, every which way but back, every which way but down.

\- We keep climbing.

The light is crashing into her eyes, waking her. 

 

It was David who saw Max's eyes open. He was on his feet immediately, trying to gauge whether he had been asleep, and if so how long for.

'Max? Max? Can you hear me?'

For a moment, nothing. But the eyes were clear. Then, very slowly, Max's head inclined, once, and lifted again. 

David nodded. 'Okay. I'm going to go get someone.'

 

When Chloe awoke David still had not returned. She didn't know where she was. 

There was a whisper, practically a croak. 'Hey, shaka brah.' 

She looked up.

 

They were saying to her, 'You have to let go, you have to let go of her.' But that she couldn't do. She clung fiercely to Max as to a rock whose horizon all around was the flat sea, hungry. There were tears on her face, but no tears on Max's face. She was too dry. Have mine, she thought, take mine. 'You have to let go. We need to help her. Let us do our work.' David was there, was saying the same thing, but she couldn't hear him. She didn't, couldn't trust him yet; merely wanted to.

Finally an orderly lifted her bodily, pulling her away as someone else - she couldn't see who, the room was all hands and arms and eyes and horrendous machines - plucked her fingers away one by one. 

She shouted fiercely, all the way. She didn't want the sea to take her, not now. Any hour after this, after minute, but not now, on the cusp of this moment. 

They took her away. They did their work.

That we might have the lives we need, we must sometimes give up the moments we want.

 

Of course there were deaths. Not as many as you might expect. But more than you'd hope. More than enough.

They kept the paper from Max for as long as they could, but a nurse, without knowing, brought it to her only two days after she woke. 

There the names. Perhaps a blessing, that it was a list short enough to be printed in a single isolated column, a grey square of text against the white, like a gravestone in snow. Perhaps a curse, a list short enough to process item by item.

Joyce Price.

Warren Graham.

Frank Bowers.

Alyssa Anderson.

Evan Harris.

More names, names she knew, names she did not know. Those she did not know, she knew she knew their owners. Had seen them, spoken to them even. Forty seven in total. She forced herself to read every name, to feel every name. What can I do? What can I do with this shit?

A voice from inside, she heard it in her left ear: Make something grow.

Her parents, thankfully, had been on a trip to the Bainbridge Islands when the storm hit. Their anniversary. When they called she was able to convince them not to come, that she was okay, that she was just fine. Somehow, she couldn't have borne it if they were there; she would have felt the need to confess everything. Another thing to conquer.

But she had Chloe.

 

'Max, would you tuck me in?'

William in his coffin, his coffin much too small for him; his daughter's coffin. William with white sheets wrapped tight around him up to his shoulders; visible on his chest, the stitches, waving like flagella.

She was struggling to breathe her way out of the dream - she was awake without knowing. Before she could figure it all, place the real against the unreal and draw the essential line between them - life - Chloe's arms were tight around her. She's heaving dry sobs, like pain is a bug in the gut that can be vomited up, flushed away. There's nothing to come, of course; her pain is grief, which is the sensation loss has of itself. So just heave after heave after heave.

'It's okay, it's okay. I'm here Max, you're here. I still love you. I love you Max, I love you.'

 

Of course there were more nightmares, nightmares for both of them, when they had to go to that place where neither could follow the other, the little death where the others we have are what we can carry of them. But they were only nightmares. Yes, the creatures of the deep places came up to meet them; but they did not go down to those dangerous territories. They woke and, when they woke, they were together. Time, and nightmares too, are a form of medicine; hard edges being softened under one's own feet, covered by one's own blood.

 

Joyce's was the worst of them. Like Warren and Frank, a closed coffin. The diner had collapsed and burned. 

She had been prepared, during this one moment, for Chloe to be distant, aloof in her grief. This, if anything, was the blade equal to what bound them. But Chloe kept her near, wanted her near, clutched her hand through all fierce enough to hurt - and hurt, for Max, gladly.

Then it was over. In singles, pairs and threes, the people scattered uncertainly. 

The evening approached. The leaves were falling. Now there were only three.

'David', Max said. 'My fault. It's all my fault.' She saw, out of the corner of her eyes, Chloe's look of horror, the sudden awful emptiness in her own hand where Chloe's hand had been, but she couldn't stop, even when her words had cracked and fallen into senseless bursts of noise. No signal; just radio Max, transmitting static on a distress band.

David, still a soldier, his face sheened with grief like stone run with water, only shook his head; but when she kept going he leant down and grasped her shoulders.

'If that's so, then it's okay, Max. Joyce would want me to forgive you. She'd give me hell if I didn't. I'd want to myself.'

He feels so frustrated, can hardly remember feeling more frustrated, even through his grief, that he can almost _feel_ something, some invisible gesture reaching out from himself, something riding his words, make contact with the young woman standing before him; encounter a surface smoothe as a mirror, clutch at it - fail to catch - and fall away.

 

The repairs had yet to commence on the crushed beach front, but already, only two weeks after the tornado struck, several new signs had been raised, discreetly, over the town. 'Coming soon,' they all read, 'Prescott Bay. A fresh take on paradise.'

 

Rachel, in her box. Rachel, out of the earth again. They kept her for awhile, they got her to tell things to a machine. Justice grinding into gear. But now they were done with her, and she was the last. Rachel, going back into the earth again. 

'You got a good spot,' Chloe said. Indeed it was.

The sun was balanced on the rim of the cup of the world. It poured honey of light as it declined - spun out sun, wrung out for one more day, going to hide underneath things awhile. The trees aflame.

Chloe hunkered down on the grass beside the fresh earth. She pulled a long white cylinder from under her hat - yes, she would wear the jacket, but she'd never ditch the hat - put the end in of the cylinder in her mouth, eventually frisked the lighter out of a pocket she'd forgotten, lit, inhaled. 'Ah, medicine.' 

'Five minutes', she had said to Max. 'Just five minutes.' _Alone with her_ , she meant, _with Rachel_. But when Max had turned to go she'd added. 'Stay in sight, tho, 'kay?' Still afraid. And she could see Max at the bottom of the hill, near the gates, waiting. She was peering through the viewfinder of her camera, trying to frame the sun between the heavy iron verticals. 

By now they were already lovers, of a tentative sort. There was joy in that tentativeness, that tension. It was a relief for both of them to be bold in small steps; vulnerability, if unhurried, becomes another name for exploration, the possibility for expansion. Every moment they gripped one another, pulled one another close, brushed lips with lips, destroyed and rebuilt their entire past together - but with new pieces, for which places had to be found. Their love-making was an act traced in salt, a circle drawn to keep demons at bay. 

When Max bucked and groaned under Chloe everything was forgotten, for a moment all was forgotten. She, Max, stood upon an apex, thrust into the air above all cloud - and what that experience stood upon, her own existence, lay invisible below her. But then the return to the earth; Max's body bucking still, but now shaking with grief, etched with a salt of tears that, try as she might, Chloe could not stem. 

Still watching Max, crouched on the hill beside the grave, Chloe declared, as if to the sky, 'This world is a shitpit. Either it goes or I do.'

Chloe turned to Rachel, beside her. She could detect disapproval. An impish grin stretched over her gritted teeth. 'Joking,' she rasped. Night before last, in the cab of her truck, Max finally sleeping, the sweat evaporating slowly in the cab's dense space, Chloe had felt overwhelmed by frustration. She had been seized by the urge to pull the ashtray from the dashboard and swallow its contents - supplies for the fire-bird in her belly, that it could make its nest. Some demons cannot be kept out. The drawn circle encloses them also.

She took another puff on the joint. Then she held it out as if offering. 'Go ahead,' she said, 'it's your fucking funeral. You might as well wake and bake. Get it? "Wake"?' 

A moment's pause. Then: 'What? Too soon?' She brushed away tears.

She waited a moment, the joint outstretched, the time it would take for another to receive and inhale, before she brought it back to her own lips. She sank back on her elbows, observing things, her teeth still clenched.

'Yep. Hella view. Not my scene, though. If it were up to me, I'd have scattered your ashes over LA. Blown you out over Arizona Bay with a cannon. Never catch me dead in a hole like this.'

A drag, and again the offer, the wait. 'You could've told me about Frank, you know. I'd have got it. Well. Not fucking got it. But I'd have dealt. I'd have dealt...'

She inhaled again, held the smoke, felt it tickle-burn at the back of her throat. She let smoke flow over her eyes, for an excuse. 'I miss you, Rachel. I miss you. We got the fuckers, but I still miss you so fucking much.'

But she was watching Max still struggle to frame her shot. Even from this distance her movements were hesitant, vague. She was inching her way back behind the camera. She only took pictures of things, Chloe had noticed. The crushed houses, the scattered cars, the trees with their wild, crazy-hair roots. No people. No selfies. Not yet, anyway. My storm, she called it. Never 'the'. My.

We're here. We both here, now. Is she strong enough for that? Am I?

There was a pause before Rachel spoke. Keep her warm. You keep her warm and you wait.

Chloe went. She diminished as she went, her outline became a confused dark mass. But half way down another outline moved towards her, away from its flutterings at the bars. The two came together, became one thing in the coming dark: a stronger darkness.

At the top of the hill, wedged into the fresh earth like a torch, the joint slowly smouldered out.


End file.
